1. Technical Field
Embodiments described herein relate to a map display control apparatus, a map display control method and a computer readable medium.
There is a significant trend recently towards high specification mobile phones, and, for example, mobile phones are becoming common that employ a Global Positioning System (GPS) function and are capable of displaying a map of the current vicinity. Using such mobile phones gives the convenience of being able to confirm your own current location in unfamiliar territory. However, it would be even more convenient, for example, if as well as the current location, certain landmarks could be searched for and the search results displayed on the map.
2. Related Art
A technique is described in JP-A-10-326280 below for identifying and displaying on a map the position of landmarks found to correspond to a given input character string. However, there is no particular mention in this technique of measures to adopt when many landmarks are found, and so the technique suffers from a difficulty in picking out the position of a desired landmark from among many landmarks.
In JP-A-2006-72802 below, a technique called “search refining” is described for picking out a desired landmark from with many landmarks. This is accomplished with pre-set hierarchical structure search conditions and by specifying in sequence pre-set hierarchical data, for example “country”, “prefecture”, “city”, “town”.
However, while JP-A-2006-72802 is superior to JP-A-10-326280 from the perspective that a desired landmark can be picked out from among many landmarks, the second related art suffers from having no flexibility in the method of refining the search. This is because refinement can only be made by specifying in sequence the pre-set hierarchical data, such as “country”, “prefecture”, “city”, “town”, “area”. Search conditions not set in advance, such as a search keyword of JP-A-10-326280, need to be keyed in by hand each time.